Snow geese migrate in huge, honking flocks, each bird winter-white except for a beak and wingtips smudged black. A single flock may comprise tens of thousands of birds. When the geese land en masse, bird hunters call it swirl, as though a twister were touching down rather than four-pound animals.

On Nov. 28, a great flock of snow geese traveling south came upon small body of water in Butte, Mont. They swirled.

This was no ordinary pond, however. It was the 700-acre Berkeley Pit, a former mine now submerged in water as acidic as distilled vinegar. From 1955 until operations ceased in 1982, miners extracted nearly 300 million tons of copper ore from the pit. They left behind an immense crevasse, which filled with water 900 feet deep. Concentrated within the floodwater are arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, copper, iron, zinc and other inorganic compounds.

After it was abandoned, the pit became a federally managed Superfund site. It also became a tourist destination, where visitors observe the mine’s toxic, reddish water for an admission fee of $2. And microorganisms able to survive in the pit became an object of scientific study.

I can’t underscore enough how many birds were in the Butte area that night

But snow geese, unlike extremophilic green slime, cannot tolerate acid water heavy in metallic compounds. Roughly 10,000 geese landed in the Berkeley Pit at the end of November, turning the water “white with birds,” said a mine official with Montana Resources, which jointly manages the pit with the Atlantic Richfield Company, to the Montana Standard. On Tuesday, investigators could not give an exact measure of how high the death toll would go. But a preliminary estimate, via drone and flyover counts, found thousands of dead birds.

“I can’t underscore enough how many birds were in the Butte area that night,” Mark Thompson, a Montana Resources environmental affairs manager, said to the Associated Press. “Numbers beyond anything we’ve ever experienced in our 21 years of monitoring by several orders of magnitude.”

As it happened this November, it has happened before.

Twenty-one years ago, in November 1995, 342 snow goose carcasses were found floating in the mine pit. High Country News reported at the time that the Atlantic Richfield Company initially disputed the water was to blame. The company pointed to a Colorado State University necropsy of two birds, which suggested the animals had died from eating tainted grain.

The grain defense did not stick. “Postmortems conducted under the auspices of the University of Wyoming later revealed what most people immediately suspected: that the geese had succumbed to the water, which is acidic enough to liquefy a motorboat’s steel propeller, and to its poisonous mineral contents, principally copper, cadmium, and arsenic,” wrote Harper’s in 1996. “In each bird autopsied, the oral cavity, trachea, and esophagus, as well as digestive organs like the gizzard and intestines, were lined with burns and festering sores.”

Trying to get some idea of mortality has been difficult

Because exposure to the pit water does not mean instantaneous death, officials will refine the 2016 toll in coming days. In the week since the birds landed, Butte residents have found dead birds in a Wal-Mart parking lot, on roadsides and outside the city, the Montana Standard reported.

“Trying to get some idea of mortality has been difficult,” said Joe Vranka, the EPA’s Montana Superfund director, to the Billings Gazette.

Due to the dangers that the mine posed to birds, the companies managing the pit had enacted a hazing strategy to scare animals from spending too much time on the water. This included an observation deck, with scopes and spotlights. If spotters saw an incoming flock, employees would fire off shotguns or loud rifles to deter the animals from coming closer. Around the pit are devices called Phoenix Wailers, speakers which emit predator cries and loud electronic noises. Until November, the effort seemed to be working; the EPA recorded 14 bird fatalities at the Berkeley Pit between 2010 and 2013.

Montana Resource’s Thompson told the Associated Press the company “did incredible things to save a lot of birds.” New deterrents, such as unmanned aircraft, may be added to the hazing program.

There are a few early theories as to what brought about November’s goose devastation. A storm may have driven birds to look for an unfrozen place to land, and the Berkeley pit was one of the only nearby options.

It is also possible that unseasonably warm weather delayed the southward migration, University of Montana Western ornithologist Jack Kirkley told the Montana Standard. At the same time, snow geese flocks are booming. The overall total population rose from about three million animals 30 years ago to 15 million. Driven to find new habitats, birds have been seen in areas where they were historically scarce.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which was unable to rely to a request for comment from The Washington Post early Wednesday, is reviewing the incident. The Montana Standard reported that the EPA will issue fines if the managing companies are found negligent.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/thousands-of-snow-geese-die-after-landing-in-toxic-montana-mine-pit-turning-the-acid-water-white-with-birds/feed0stdGeese-Mine PitThese two moose locked antlers in a fight, then drowned and froze together in an Alaskan streamhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/these-two-moose-locked-antlers-in-a-fight-then-drowned-and-froze-together-in-an-alaskan-stream
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/these-two-moose-locked-antlers-in-a-fight-then-drowned-and-froze-together-in-an-alaskan-stream#respondFri, 18 Nov 2016 19:29:33 +0000https://nationalpostcom.wordpress.com?p=1256096&preview_id=1256096

The sight of hulking moose isn’t uncommon in the region around Unalakleet, an Alaska town on the coast of the Bering Sea. But Brad Webster had never seen moose like this before.

Webster, a social studies and science teacher, was showing a friend around the grounds of the Bible camp that he helps maintain. It was early November — before the first snow, but cold enough that the slough at the site was covered in a sheet of ice thick enough to walk on and clear enough to see through. Webster’s friend was new to Alaska, and it was his first time walking on ice. So they decided to go for a walk on the waterway.

The two men rounded a bend, and there, Webster said, they saw it: a large set of antlers and a hairy brown hump protruding from the ice. They got closer, and they saw another hump — and another set of antlers, entangled with the first set.

The two bull moose were lying on their sides, apparently locked in a fight to the death, and now perfectly preserved in 20 centimetres of ice.

“We were both kind of in awe,” Webster, 33, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve heard of other animals this had happened to, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Jeff EricksonNearly two weeks later, Brad Webster and friends went to recover the two moose heads.

Neither have most people. Another friend of Webster’s, Jeff Erickson, posted photos of the moose on Facebook this week, and the remarkable sight promptly shot around the globe (sparking, predictably, some metaphorical jokes about politics). Erickson said even “elders” in the town had never seen such a thing.

Kris Hundertmark, chair of the biology and wildlife department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in an email that male moose compete for females by clashing antlers and pushing against each other during the fall breeding season. Adult male moose are extremely strong, he said, but their large antlers often have “complex” shapes that can become so entangled that the animals cannot dislodge themselves from their opponents, he said. Hundertmark said the only ones he’s seen are skulls of conjoined moose found in the wild – but not in ice.

“These two fellows were unfortunate in that they probably fell into the water while locked together and drowned,” Hundertmark said. “Then again, that is a much quicker way to go than by getting locked together in some forest and slowly starving to death.”

This past weekend, Webster, Erickson, and a few other friends — including a taxidermist — went back to the site to retrieve the two moose heads, which Webster said he wanted to mount and use as unique wall hangings with a heck of a back story at the Bible camp. It took a few hours, a chainsaw and an ice pick to get through the ice, under which were about two feet of water, he said. They left the carcasses, which he said some people in town are talking about using to feed dog sled teams.

When they examined the heads, it looked like one moose might have pierced the other’s skull, Webster said, leading him to believe that one might have died mid-battle, then pulled the other down into the water with him.

“After that one’s dead, it’s kind of like you won the battle but you lose the war, because you’ve got a whole other moose attached to your head right now,” he said.

Erickson, 57, said in an email that the sight of the drowned moose, which were by Saturday covered in a dusting of white, will stay with him.

“Life in northwest Alaska can have a stark reality and brutal consequences,” he wrote. But, he added: “I was just happy to be part of the recovery. … The view of the antlers protruding from the ice with the soft layer of snow on the carcasses not encased in the ice was such a stark and eerily beautiful scene.”

It was likely a messy accident when the dinosaur nicknamed “Mud Dragon” died in a region of China that once was a watery jungle.

Given the dinosaur’s posture and the mudstone that surrounded its skeleton, experts hypothesize that the animal succumbed to a pool of muck in a last violent moment. After the death throes and last breaths, the animal was left lying on its belly, arms askew and neck thrown skyward. There its body sat and its bones hardened to fossils.

The posture was so odd that dinosaur experts could not help but romanticize it, at least a bit. “We don’t know how long the struggle lasted, but we believe the creature never gave up,” Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences paleontologist Lu Junchang said to the South China Morning Post.

And some 66 million to 72 million years later, the fossilized remains of the dinosaur very nearly suffered one final insult: A TNT blast into complete oblivion. But this time, it prevailed by a hair – or, more appropriately for the quilled dinosaur in question, a feather.

Workers in South China, excavating a hill for a new school, exposed the bones in a dynamite blast. In the explosion, the dinosaur lost parts of its arms, hind leg and tail. One of the drill holes passed close to the animal’s pelvic girdle, taking a chunk of fossil with it.

But the dynamite missed the vital sections of the dinosaur. “We got lucky – the workmen placed the dynamite in a position that was close enough to the animal to expose it, but far enough away that it didn’t destroy it. A razor’s edge!” University of Edinburgh paleontologist Stephen Brusatte said in an email to The Washington Post. “The missing portions would be good to have, but they’re not the critical parts.” The crested skull, in particular, was intact.

Although the majority of the dinosaur was recovered, it was not a typical, studious removal. After it was blown out of the hillside, a farmer and construction workers collected the remains. Lu, Brusatte and a team of colleagues at the Dongyang Museum were therefore unable to conclude in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday what exactly caused its odd posture.

“We don’t know this for sure,” Brusatte said, “but it’s an interpretation based on the fossil and geological evidence. It’s kind of like interpreting a crime scene.” In addition to the unusual posture, the skeleton was pristine, with no signs of damage from scavengers or flowing currents. It must have been buried quickly, he noted, in rock that hardened from ancient muck.

“It really looks like this animal was trying to free itself from something. Looking at the fossil, you get a feel for this living, breathing, dying animal,” Brusatte said. “It’s kind of sad.” The scientists named the animal Tongtianlong limosus, meaning “muddy dragon on the road to heaven,” a reference to the way the body twisted as though in supplication.

Tongtianlong limosus has been described as roughly the size of a large sheep, or perhaps a donkey. To our eyes, it might have looked something like a bird – its arms and body were covered in feathers. But it would have been an odd sheep-size duck indeed. It measured 6.5 feet long, with a blunt head, skull crest and a curved, toothless beak.

It really looks like this animal was trying to free itself from something. Looking at the fossil, you get a feel for this living, breathing, dying animal

The species belonged to a family of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs. (The oviraptors were so named because scientists believed the animals stole and ate eggs – the first oviraptor was found menacing over a clutch of eggs. Later, it was apparent the animal was simply tending to its own nest.) What the animals ate is a matter of debate, though the large jaws and beaks may have been able to crush hard foods like mollusks. The unusual curve of the creature’s beak suggest it was a specialized eater, although scientists do not know exactly what was on the dinosaur’s menu.

Despite its feathers, Tongtianlong limosus could not take to the sky. The evolutionary pressure that created feathers, contrary to what it might seem, preceded both birds and flight. As paleontologist Dave Hone wrote at the Guardian, feathers offer a variety of benefits even to creatures that spent their lives firmly on the ground: as insulation, a means of shade or coloration.

Perhaps the feathers helped make the dinosaur a more dexterous one. “Long feathers on the arms might have helped with balance when running or climbing,” Hone noted, “and those who have seen ostriches run will know they can flight their wings right out to help them balance during right turns.”

Thanks to a construction boom around Ganzhou, South China has become a hotbed of dinosaur discovery. The dinosaur was the sixth new species found in the area, as workers slice through ancient bedrock to create new roads and buildings.

Many of the animals found there hail from the late Cretaceous period, the last time dinosaurs walked the earth. They evolved into strange and specialized dinosaurs like Tongtianlong limosus up to the very end.

“They were part of the final wave of diversification before the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared in the chaos of the asteroid impact,” Brusatte said. “So dinosaurs apparently were doing quite well at the end, particularly these oviraptorosaurs that were blossoming into so many new species, and then, bam! Everything changed in an instant.”

On Sunday night, the BBC aired its first episode of the wildlife documentary Planet Earth II, a sequel to the beloved Planet Earth series. More than 9 million Brits tuned in to once again marvel at the natural world, while Sir David Attenborough once again provided his singular narration. And over the course of the next few days, a consensus arose that one particular scene stood above all the rest: The birth of marine iguanas on a Galapagos beach.

The baby lizards were cute, sure, for a species with pebbled faces like lumps of charcoal. From an evolutionary perspective, they are extraordinary creatures, too, the only lizards adapted to live in the ocean. Numbering no more than 30,000 per island in the Galapagos chain, they cling in groups to the rocks at the very edge of the sea. When hungry, they feed underwater, diving below the surface to scrape up algae with their powerful jaws.

Pregnant iguanas bury their eggs on a rocky beach. When the infant lizards are ready to hatch, they burrow up one after the other. But what made the Planet Earth II footage so enthralling was the introduction of an adversary.

Attenborough, his narration turning grave, gave them an entrance cue: “Racer snakes.”

With those two words, the beach exploded into action. The predatory snakes flooded the shore, eager for the easiest meal of the year. Which, of course, were the cute lizards.

And here Planet Earth II became the stuff wildlife doc dreams are made of. As one little iguana scampered across the beach, darting from narrow escape to narrow escape, the camera followed. It was out of a James Bond movie. It was Indiana Jones. It was the way George Miller might track Tom Hardy fleeing apocalyptic gearheads through the deserts of Mad Max.

“Rarely has any real-life footage made the heart thump so hard in my chest,” wrote Telegraph reviewer Gerard O’Donovan, “as during this sublimely edited five-minute sequence (which may prompt many an anxiety dream in years to come).”

It was Forrest Gump, too.

“The big difference between dramas and docs are that everything is preplanned with dramas; when you are filming animals you never know what you’ll get,” Matthew Meech, who edited the episode, told The Independent. “So a lot of the story structure happens in the edit working with the director/producer.

Meech said that editors often meticulously go through up to 20 hours of footage, shot over weeks, to arrange just a five-minute sequence.

“There was so much good footage that we couldn’t tell the story of just one iguana so we found a way of using all the great chase moments. As well as some of the more grisly footage (although there’s a limit to how much you want to see of that),” Meech said.

“One of the amazing things about the encounter was that it was shot at such a high speed. So in real life those things are moving much, much faster. It’s incredibly hard to film them while running and keep everything in focus. But sometimes the focus didn’t matter as the moment was so intense. The music and sound design was obviously a big part of it too. The work everyone did was amazing.”

A shocking video has revealed that even penguins — those seemingly sweet seabirds known for being faithful to their mates — can get caught up in a sordid love triangle. And the consequences can be downright bloody.

National Geographic posted a video to Twitter on Friday of two male penguins in a brutal fight over a female. The footage of a mate and a “homewrecker” battering and pecking at each other has since been retweeted more than 245,000 times.

“This husband has come home to find his wife with another penguin,” the narrator says as the camera zooms in on two penguins cozying up under a branch. “He flips out. His strategy is simple: batter the homewrecker until he flees.”

Then the narrator provides a few helpful facts: “Most birds have hollow bones in their wings to make them lighter for flight. But penguins don’t fly. Their flippers contain solid bones. They use them like baseball bats to club each other, delivering up to eight blows a second.”

He also provides this cheery tidbit: “Penguins usually use their beaks to gouge their burrows. Now, they are gouging out eyes.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/penguin-comes-home-to-find-wife-with-homewrecker-bloody-fight-ensues-shes-got-no-time-for-losers/feed1stdhomewrecker-penguin-national-geographicPedals, the walking bear that captured hearts around the world, was killed by a hunter in New Jerseyhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/pedals-the-walking-bear-that-captured-hearts-around-the-world-was-killed-by-a-hunter-in-new-jersey
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 12:38:09 +0000https://nationalpostcom.wordpress.com?p=1229249&preview_id=1229249

Pedals, a beloved American black bear who walked upright and strolled around the suburbs of New Jersey like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon come to life, was believed to have been killed by a hunter last week, animal welfare activists said. His age was not known.

Since 2014, residents of Rockaway Township have posted videos online of the bear strolling through their neighborhoods and backyards with admirable posture, his forepaws pulled close to his chest. Many commented that on first glance, Pedals resembled a man wearing a bear suit.

But it appears that local celebrity was not enough to save Pedals during the state’s five-day hunting season for black bears, which began Monday and allowed hunters to kill bears with a bow and arrow for the first time since the 1960s. He was one of 487 bears killed by hunters in New Jersey last week.

Related

It was unknown whether Pedals walked upright because his forepaws were injured or if he had been born with a congenital defect, but either way his supporters had organized into an online community to promote his well-being. On Friday, an administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to the bear posted an anguished statement for its more than 21,000 followers. It was tagged “feeling heartbroken.”

“PEDALS IS DEAD,” the statement said, which accused authorities of not doing enough to protect a local treasure and said the state’s Department of Environmental Protection and the Division of Fish and Wildlife “really don’t have a heart.”

“For the hundreds and thousands of animals lovers who were following his story, I am sorry that we have this sad news to bring to you,” the statement said. “PEDALS is at peace now because his beautiful soul left his body when he was killed.”

The internet does not like it when a famous animal is killed (think of Cecil the Lion or Harambe, the Cincinnati zoo gorilla turned into an unstoppable meme). The apparent death of Pedals at the hands of a hunter was also met with the by now predictable online outrage. Gothamist reported that the bear had been “assassinated.”

Bob Considine, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, said Saturday that a dead bear with visible injuries had been brought into a check station last week. But in a statement, the department cautioned that it had “no way of verifying the identity of any bear that has not been previously tagged or had a DNA sample previously taken.”

Considine said biologists working for the department had taken pictures of that bear and they would soon be released to the public. “We plan on releasing them to whoever wants them early next week,” he said.

Animal welfare activists had unsuccessfully tried to get Pedals relocated to a wildlife preserve in New York. A GoFundMe page dedicated to that effort collected more than US$22,000, and a petition calling on state officials to facilitate such a move gathered more than 300,000 signatures.

Joe Esposito via The New York Times The apparent death of Pedals at the hands of a hunter was also met with the by now predictable online outrage.

New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country and its ursine residents have seen their numbers grow, too, since the 1980s, according to the Division of Fish and Wildlife. They have expanded their habitat from their traditional stamping grounds in the forested northwestern part of the state and have now been sighted in all 21 counties, the department said. Lisa Rose-Rublack, who organized the petition to have Pedals relocated, did not respond to messages seeking comment Saturday.

Bears and humans typically live cheek by jowl with few problems, but tragedy has struck before. In 2014, Darsh Patel, a 22-year-old Rutgers University student was killed by a black bear while hiking with friends in West Milford, the first death caused by a bear in the New Jersey’s history. In 2015 a Boy Scout troop leader was injured in a bear attack while hiking with children in Rockaway Township.

Joe Esposito via The New York Times Animal welfare activists had unsuccessfully tried to get Pedals relocated to a wildlife preserve in New York.

]]>stdAn American black bear, nicknamed Pedals by residents of northern New Jersey, walks upright to avoid using his maimed front legs.Joe Esposito via The New York Times Joe Esposito via The New York Times Stunning albino moose allegedly spotted in Alaska, but are ghostly white moose really all that rare?http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/stunning-albino-moose-allegedly-spotted-in-alaska-but-are-ghostly-white-moose-really-all-that-rare
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/stunning-albino-moose-allegedly-spotted-in-alaska-but-are-ghostly-white-moose-really-all-that-rare#commentsTue, 04 Oct 2016 20:35:16 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=1220816

A mysterious video of an apparent white Alaskan moose has captured the heart of the internet. As of Tuesday afternoon, the video, first posted to the Facebook page I Love Alaska, had accumulated more than 1.2 million views.

But while the sight of a totally white moose is rare, with more than 1 million moose across North America the condition is not unknown.

“Albino and/or leucistic moose occasionally turn up in Alaska, and there have been several sightings over the years in Interior Alaska, particularly,” said Ken Marsh, a spokesman with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. With between 175,000 and 200,000 moose, Alaska is home to roughly one sixth of the continent’s moose population.

Albinism, a congenital disorder in which pigmentation is absent from much of the body, has been observed in almost all branches of the animal kingdom — including even-toed ungulates such as deer and moose.

Between 2009 and 2013, for instance, guests at the Alaska Garden Bed and Breakfast on the outskirts of Fairbanks have regularly spotted a white cow moose with a regular brown calf in tow.

Across Canada, meanwhile, albino moose have been spotted in virtually every region that is home to the regular brown kind of moose.

In 1939, an albino moose was glimpsed by King George VI and his wife, who were passing through Banff on a pre-Second World War Canadian tour. “Their Majesties also saw a beaver, a Rocky Mountain goat and scores of elk,” read a press account from the time.

Just across the border from Alaska, the Yukon’s MacBride Museum features a taxidermied albino moose shot in 1968 by the legendary Yukon trapper and outfitter Alex Van Bibber. “The albino was palomino color, with pink eyes, lips and pink hoofs,” declared the Whitehorse Star at the time.

Remarkably, there is no evidence of discrimination against the rare albino ungulate, this is an admirable moose quality and one that obviates the need for any legislative intervention

Yukon albino moose even got a tongue-in-cheek reference in a 2004 memoir by former Yukon premier Tony Penikett.

“Remarkably, there is no evidence of discrimination against the rare albino ungulate, this is an admirable moose quality and one that obviates the need for any legislative intervention,” he wrote.

Some populations of white Canadian moose may not even be albino. White “spirit” moose that have been observed for decades near Foleyet, Ont., for instance, are believed to be part of an anomalous subspecies of moose.

The Foleyet animals are essentially in the same category as B.C.’s iconic spirit bear, a subspecies of white-coated black bears that are also not albino. Previously moose studies have referred to this phenomenon as a “white morph.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5GJTdkLOSw&w=640&h=390]

Foleyet’s white moose are protected from hunting by Ontario law. Similarly, around the world the once-vaunted prize of shooting a white moose has become extremely taboo.

In Nova Scotia in 2013, visiting hunters shot and killed a white moose on Cape Breton Island — outraging local Mi’kmaq groups who had spared the ungulate’s life due to its uniqueness as a “spirit animal.”

The apologetic hunters ultimately turned over the white hide to Nova Scotia’s Millbrook First Nation, where the deceased animal was honoured in a four-day ceremony.

Two years before, a very similar saga had played out on the other side of the Atlantic. Albin, a white moose that lived on the outskirts of Oslo, Norway, had been protected for at least four years by a gentlemen’s agreement among local hunters.

That is, until in 2011 when the moose was killed by a visiting Dane. “I decided to shoot the moose and it’s a decision I stand by,” he told Norwegian media.

Scandinavia, incidentally, is also home to one of the world’s leading photographers of white moose is Norway’s Lasse Dybdahl. A 2016 YouTube video by Dybdahl contains some of the most intimate footage yet captured of a white moose.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk_q_mOwlPM&w=640&h=390]

The animal lives somewhere in Sweden near the Norwegian border, although Dybdahl has declined to state exactly where.

“I don’t want to reveal the exact location. I want the moose to live in peace,” he said in an interview.

Interestingly, the eyes of Dybdahl’s moose are not pink, leading to speculation that its coat is also white due to a Foleyet-style gene, rather than albinism.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/stunning-albino-moose-allegedly-spotted-in-alaska-but-are-ghostly-white-moose-really-all-that-rare/feed1stdscreen-shot-2016-10-04-at-11-13-53-amWatch a mischievous black bear lead police on a chase through the streets of downtown Anchorage, Alaskahttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/watch-a-mischievous-black-bear-lead-police-on-a-chase-through-the-streets-of-downtown-anchorage-alaska
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/watch-a-mischievous-black-bear-lead-police-on-a-chase-through-the-streets-of-downtown-anchorage-alaska#respondThu, 22 Sep 2016 15:46:36 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=1211675

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbtSCSS8oBY&w=640&h=390]

A gallivanting male black bear led police in Alaska on an hours-long chase as it roamed through “the urban jungle” of downtown Anchorage last Thursday.

The mischievous bear’s city escapades were recorded by a dashboard camera and the police department shared an edited version of the video to its Facebook page. It has since been viewed more than 1 million times.

“Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to catch an eluding suspect … especially when they are wild, unpredictable and have four feet,” the post said. The opening captions noted that this is something you would “only find in Alaska.”

The video begins with the approximately 100-kilogram black bear sauntering across an Anchorage street — past a store called Furs — to the soundtrack of I Fought the Law (and the law won).

Security footage shows the same bear loitering outside a hotel at about 5:45 p.m.

“He looked into the doors of two of the exits, then took off across the parking lot towards the pool.” Eddie Parker, the manager of The Aviator Hotel told KTUU. “He was pretty mellow, just minding his business.”

About 15 minutes later, the bear was cornered in the Anchorage Cemetery.

“Officers worked with cemetery security to evacuate anyone who was in the cemetery, then locked the gates to prevent anyone from entering,” Castro told ADN.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game arrived at about 7 p.m.

The bear had climbed a spruce tree, but once it came down it was tranquillized and released at an undisclosed location north of the city.

There has been no word on whether the bear is planning another trip to the big city.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/watch-a-mischievous-black-bear-lead-police-on-a-chase-through-the-streets-of-downtown-anchorage-alaska/feed0stdbearYoung humpback whale had just hours to live when it was freed from tangled equipment off B.C. coasthttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/young-humpback-whale-had-just-hours-to-live-when-it-was-freed-from-tangled-marine-equipment-b-c
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/young-humpback-whale-had-just-hours-to-live-when-it-was-freed-from-tangled-marine-equipment-b-c#respondThu, 15 Sep 2016 14:52:19 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=1206079

BELLA BELLA, B.C. — A young humpback whale is gouged and covered with bloody abrasions, but is expected to survive being snared in parts of unused marine equipment on British Columbia’s central coast.

Department of Fisheries marine mammal co-ordinator Paul Cottrell estimated the whale had only hours to live by the time he and a team of rescuers cut it free of ropes that barely allowed the animal to reach the surface of a remote bay two hours outside Bella Bella.

The roughly three-year-old, 10 or 11-metre humpback had been entangled for about six hours on Monday by the time experts arrived to carry out the dangerous rescue, Cottrell said.

He said the whale thrashed and fought throughout a six-hour procedure as the team tried to decide which ropes to cut so the snare of equipment would fall away, freeing the exhausted animal.

The final cuts, completed after dark and beneath the spotlights of a rescue barge and under constant threat of a wayward tail flip or descending pectoral fin, were a tremendous relief, Cottrell said.

He said if members of the Kitasoo First Nation and a company that owned the unused equipment had not made a timely call to the BC Marine Mammal Response Network hotline, the whale would probably not have survived.

“It was tremendous, everybody coming together to make sure this rescue had all the logistics in place,” Cottrell said of a specialized Fisheries Department team, along with members of the First Nation and staff from an aquaculture company that owned the equipment the whale became caught in.

Cottrell said he believes a single rope connecting a heavy anchor to a floating bouy caused the near-fatal entanglement when the young whale snagged the line in its mouth as it foraged for food.

“(It) spiralled and got the rope wrapped around its body and through the mouth, through the baleen,” he said, describing the clutter of rope that wrapped the whale from head to tail, gouging away chunks of skin and blubber as it struggled to stay at the surface to breathe.

Watching the humpback show a sudden burst of energy as it shed all the ropes offered rescuers optimism that the juvenile will survive, Cottrell said of the experience he called rewarding.

He urged the public to use the marine mammal reporting hotline if they see an animal that is dead or in trouble.

We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care – but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

In this case, the perturbation is us, rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species – rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

From sharks to whales, giant clams, sea turtles, and tuna, the disproportionate threat to larger marine organisms reflects the “unique human propensity to cull the largest members of a population,” the authors write.

“What to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,” said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the study’s lead author. “So that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogue . . . this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.”

These losses in the ocean are paralleling what humans did to land animals some 50,000 to 10,000 years ago

The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of a 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species – called “genera.” And they found that increases in an organism’s body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period – but that this was not the case in the Earth’s distant past.

Indeed, during the past 66 million years, there was actually a small link between smaller body sizes and going extinct, marking the present as a strong reversal. “The extreme bias against large-bodied animals distinguishes the modern diversity crisis from all potential deep-time analogs,” the researchers write.

The study also notes that on land, we’ve already seen the same pattern – and in fact, we saw it first. “Human hunting has been extensive for many thousands of years on land, whereas it’s been extensive for a couple of hundred years in the oceans,” says Payne.

Thus, humans already drove to extinction many land-based large animal species in what has been dubbed the Late Quaternary extinction event as the most recent ice age came to a close.

“These losses in the ocean are paralleling what humans did to land animals some 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, when we wiped out around half of the big-bodied mammal species on Earth, like mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth cats and the like,” said Anthony Barnosky, executive director of Stanford Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, who was not involved in the study but reviewed it for the Post. “As a result, terrestrial ecosystems were locked into a new trajectory that included local biodiversity loss over and above the loss of the large animals themselves, and changes in which kinds of plants dominated.”

Barnosky was the co-author of a study published last year that found an “exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already underway.”

A particular problem, says Payne, is that if you take out all the top predators, then the species they used to prey upon can run amok and explode in population, having large reverberating effects on the entire ecosystem.

“The preferential removal of the largest animals from the modern oceans, unprecedented in the history of animal life, may disrupt ecosystems for millions of years even at levels of taxonomic loss far below those of previous mass extinctions,” the authors write.

Interestingly, if climate change was the key driver of species losses, you’d expect a more evenly distributed set of risks to organisms.

“I’ve worked on the Permian mass extinction quite a bit, it shows environmental evidence of ocean warming, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation, the loss of oxygen from seawater,” says Payne. These are the very same threats to the oceans that we’re worried about now due to ongoing climate change. But the Permian extinction, some 250 million years ago, did not feature a selective disappearance of large-bodied organisms, Payne says.

Thus, as previous work has also suggested, the current study underscores ecosystem risks are not being principally driven by a changing climate – yet. Rather, they’re being driven more directly by humans which species hunt and fish, and where they destroy ecosystems to build homes, farms, cities, and much more. But as climate change worsens, it will compound what’s already happening.

“The losses the authors describe in the oceans do not include the extinctions expected from business-as-usual climate change,” said Barnosky. “Adding those human-triggered losses onto those we’re already causing from over-fishing, pollution, and so on is very likely to put the human race in the same class as an asteroid strike-like the one that killed the dinosaurs-as an extinction driver.”

The study emerges even as the U.S. State Department prepares to open its third annual Our Ocean conference, where heads of state and ocean advocates convene to try to protect more and more of the oceans’ area from over-fishing and other forms of despoilment (and climate change). The study should only heighten the focus at that event.

But Payne says that, in a way, the research is in some ways heartening for those who care about ocean conservation – precisely because human-driven large animal extinctions in the sea are not as advanced as they are on land, there is still a huge amount of biological life that we can save.

“I talked to a couple of people who said they found this a very discouraging result,” Payne says. “I tend not to look at it that way. I think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the oceans, because we haven’t impacted them much yet.”

LONDON – Two dolphins have been recorded for the first time having a conversation, after scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals’ different “voices.”

Researchers have known for decades that the mammals have an advanced form of communication, using distinctive clicks and whistles to show they are excited, happy, stressed or separated from the group.

But they have now shown that dolphins alter the volume and pitch of pulsed clicks to form individual “words” which they string together into sentences in much the same way as humans speak.

Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.

This language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language. This indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language

Vyacheslav Ryabov, the lead researcher, said: “Essentially, this exchange resembles a conversation between two people. Each pulse that is produced by dolphins is different from another by its appearance in the time domain and by the set of spectral components in the frequency domain.

“In this regard, we can assume that each pulse represents a phoneme or a word of the dolphin’s spoken language. The analysis of numerous pulses registered in our experiments showed that the dolphins took turns in producing (sentences) and did not interrupt each other, which gives reason to believe that each dolphin listened to the other’s pulses before producing its own.

“This language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language. This indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language.”

Dolphins have possessed brains that are larger and more complex than human brains for more than 25 million years. The researchers found that Yasha and Yana could create sentences of up to five “words,” but the scientists do not understand the content.

Ryabov said it was now beyond doubt that dolphins speak their own language and it is time to start studying how to communicate directly with them.

“Humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people,” he added.

Scientists already knew that dolphins use more than 1,000 different types of whistle depending on social context, but it was unclear whether they could communicate one-to-one.

VANCOUVER — The last three mute swans in the city’s renowned Stanley Park have found a new home after a fourth was killed recently by otters in Lost Lagoon.

Two of the swans have already been moved to a 10-acre private retreat in the Lower Mainland. The remaining male, Bijan, will get his own pond there as well when Parks Board staff are able to capture and relocate him.

Mute swans have been a fixture in Lost Lagoon since the 1950s, said biologist Mike McIntosh, who acts as a wildlife ranger for the Vancouver Parks Board. He recalls as many as 70 living there when he started with the city’s Parks Board in 1965.

“The general curator for the zoo and parks board came from England where it was common to have swans on gorgeous country estates.

Ian Smith/Vancouver SunSwans and ducks in Stanley Park share some grain dropped into an unfrozen section of the Lost Lagoon in December 2009.

“Mute swans are native to Europe. However, over time, Lost Lagoon became a difficult environment for them. It’s wilder and a bit less managed than it used to be so they are having more interactions with wildlife,” he said.

“The birds aren’t capable of defending themselves. They are getting older and, like all of us, they deserve a happy and healthy retirement.”

He said Canada Wildlife Services is against mute swans proliferating, so the Parks Board in the past has clipped their wings and addled their eggs to prevent offspring.

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Retreat owner Anna Dean, who asked that the exact location not be revealed, said the couple, Tristan and Marika, were initially stressed by the move but after a few days have settled in nicely to their new home. Marika is approximately 20 years old and the two other swans are around 12 years old.

“My priority is to get them settled, happy and relaxed in a safe place,” said Dean, who has a permit with Canada Wildlife Services to own swans.

Dean, who already owns another pair of swans, said there are lots of ponds on her property so they can each have their own ponds and not have to fight over territory.

“I have seven-foot fencing around my 10-acre property to keep dogs and predators out so it’s a more safe environment for them. It’s also a more natural environment. The pond has duck weed that floats on top of the water. That is their natural food so the swans are just loving that. They haven’t been interested in the grain (they used to be fed at Lost Lagoon) because they have so much good food to eat,” she said.

Dean said she has made provisions in her will to ensure the swans go to an experienced swan keeper if she is unable to care for them, noting swans can live up to 30 years.

]]>stdswanIan Smith/Vancouver Sun‘We bloody well found her!’: Runner reunited with dog that followed him on ultramarathon in Chinahttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/we-bloody-well-found-her-runner-reunited-with-dog-that-followed-him-on-ultramarathon-in-china
Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:56:35 +0000https://nationalpostcom.wordpress.com?p=1190646&preview_id=1190646

A small stray dog had won hearts all over the world after deciding to follow an Australian runner for several days during an ultramarathon through China’s vast, forbidding Gobi desert.

Dion Leonard fell in love with the dog, named her Gobi and planned to bring her back to his home in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Then, on Aug. 15, just before she was due to travel to Beijing to enter quarantine, the dog disappeared, scampering out an open door in the Chinese city of Urumqi, where she was being looked after.

Leonard flew back to China to look, launching a media and social media campaign and putting posters up all around the city. Volunteers helped him scour Urumqi, asking guards, taxi drivers, cleaners and fruit vendors, visiting parks and dog shelters, talking to anyone who might have seen the dog. Local television interviewed Leonard, residents stopped him in the street to say they were looking, crying about the story, he said. Phoenix media even launched a live blog to update people about the search.

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But at the bottom of his heart, Leonard feared it would be a fruitless quest. Urumqi is a huge city of three million people, and he feared the dog could even have run back into the countryside that surrounds it, where people speak the Uighur language, don’t use social media and were unlikely to even be aware of the campaign.

Gobi has been found! More details to follow but safe & well! I'm overjoyed! Thank you for all support!! https://t.co/lCSUE06fz1

“I needed to come and do it, just to be sure in my own mind I had done it,” he told BBC Radio Five Live. “But realistically I was dreading having to go back home next week without her.”

Then, on Wednesday evening, a Chinese man called: he and his son had seen a small stray dog in a local park while walking his own dog. They had brought her home and thought she could be the one.

Still, after a couple of false alarms, Leonard was skeptical. The man had sent pictures but the lighting wasn’t good.

“Walking into the room, I was already thinking this isn’t going to be Gobi, and I’m a bit down about the last few days,” he told the Washington Post. “I walked into the room, and I didn’t say a word. There were actually about ten people in the room at this stage.”

“Gobi spotted me as soon as I walked in, and she started running towards me. Literally she was running up my leg, and jumping all over me, and squealing with delight.”

It was just mind-blowing to think that we had found her,” he said. “It was a miracle.”

Talking to the BBC earlier, Leonard called it “love again at immediate sight.”

Leonard told the BBC’s Phil Williams that he had struggled to stay positive during his stay in Urumqi, especially as time ran out before he had to return to Britain next week.

“I had actually spoken to Phil the night before, and I was pretty down and depressed about things,” he said. “I was starting to realize this wasn’t going to happen.”

Leonard told the Post that the day he had heard Gobi had gone missing was “pretty close to one of the worst days” of his life, but being reunited with her was one of the best.

He said Gobi had not left his side on Thursday, and said he can’t pinpoint why the dog had formed such an immediate and close bond with him. “It must be something about my smell or something that she likes,” he said. “But literally, as soon as I walked in, she clocked me. It was just like we were back together again at the race.”

Leonard raised £19,700 ($33,600) through a crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs of bringing Gobi back to Britain, and a further £9,300 to finance the search. He paid tribute to everyone around the world who had supported him, and especially to the people of Urumqi, whose response he said had been “overwhelming.”

“The amount of people we’ve had volunteering, going out from six in the morning to midnight trying to find her has just been absolutely amazing,” he said.

When Gobi went missing, some media reports had highlighted the dog meat trade in China, he said, but that was ridiculous. “Urumqi is far from that. It is very much a dog-loving city,” he said. “You could see that by the response of everyone, getting out in their own time to help. Without them, I wouldn’t have found her. It’s as simple as that.”

He has posted a short video of them together on his Facebook page and Twitter.

Recalling the race, he said Gobi had completed four of the six day-long stages of the ultramarathon, running around 125 kilometres with him. The pair even won the third stage together.

Until recently, Ringo, a three-year-old poodle in Montreal, had a spotless record. No scraps with other dogs at the dog park; just a playful bundle of white fur who liked to chase after squirrels.

Which is why a brush with the city’s paw patrol came as a total shock to his owners.

They say bylaw enforcement officers stopped Ringo and his dog walker on Aug. 12 at a Montreal intersection, alleged that Ringo was not wearing proper doggie ID, and issued a $149 ticket.

Zoe Mintz, whose mother owns Ringo, says the dog was wearing an ID tag issued in neighbouring Westmount, an enclave of Montreal, that day, but the officers insisted he needed to have a tag issued by the city of Montreal to walk the city’s streets.

Courtesy of Zoe MintzRingo's ID tag issued in neighbouring Westmount.

“It’s shocking that city resources are being used to stop dog walkers who are trying to enjoy the city on a Friday evening. Don’t they have better things to do?” said Mintz, who has consulted a lawyer and has no intention of paying the fine.

“I would understand if Ringo wasn’t registered at all, but he did have a tag. We are diligent dog owners. We respect the laws. We’ve never had a problem.”

However, a spokeswoman for the city of Montreal, offered a different version of events late Wednesday.

Geneviève Dubé said the reason officers cited the dog walker was because Ringo was not wearing any tags — either from Westmount or Montreal — and the dog walker had no paperwork to show the animal was licensed anywhere.

She said the city has no issues with licensed dogs from other jurisdictions entering its boundaries.

Mintz, however, said her mother is meticulous and had Ringo’s tag renewed this year and that it’s worn on his collar all the time, including the day of the encounter with authorities.

She is preparing a written response and will include documentation proving the family had a valid registration.

“Hopefully, given the evidence, they can throw it out,” she said.

Courtesy of Zoe MintzZoe Mintz says while she has no problem with cities requiring dog owners to register their pets, enforcement officers seem to be over zealous.

Montreal has intensified animal control enforcement measures this summer — checking to make sure pet owners have appropriate registration tags and leashes — after a series of serious dog attacks.

A 55-year-old woman was killed in June after her neighbour’s pit bull attacked her in her yard.

Mintz says while she has no problem with cities requiring dog owners to register their pets, enforcement officers seem to be over zealous. The officers in this case could have given her dog walker a warning — the stiff $149 fine is three times the amount for a typical parking citation, she said.

Until her appeal is heard, Mintz says she has reluctantly paid $30 for a second registration tag from the city of Montreal.

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Mintz is caring for her mother, who has cancer and is in hospital, and doesn’t want to risk the possibility of running afoul of the law again.

“Since the incident, I purchased a city of Montreal dog tag for peace of mind. The last thing I need right now is for another person who’s kind enough to help us out during this difficult time to get a fine.”

Christina Jez, the owner of Walks & Wags, a Montreal dog-walking service, says it’s “absurd” dog owners should have to register their pets in multiple places.

“As long as you registered where you live, that should be good enough. (It’s as if) you’re being held hostage in your own community.”

Jez said she often walks in different boroughs when taking clients’ dogs for walks and has no intention of stopping.

“I am still crossing boundaries,” she said. “We like our dogs to visit different areas and they like it too.”

Like something out of an entomological horror movie, experts have identified the first case in Canada of honeybees being attacked by parasitizing flies that turn the insects into “zombies” before killing them.

“Zombie bees” were confirmed outside of Nanaimo, B.C, in June, when first-time beekeeper Sarah Wallbank noticed her insects were acting strangely. She trapped the bees, which were staggering around late at night and appeared disoriented, and within days, witnessed pupae emerging from them.

“At least 42 larvae had crawled out of the bee corpses,” Wallbank said. “Then out of those 42 pupae, 23 flies emerged.”

After researching symptoms online, Wallbank sent photographic samples to ZomBee Watch, a citizen science project that tracks infected bees in North America. In July, she was told her honeybees had been parasitized by the phorid fly.

“This is the first time we’ve known of it happening in Canada,” said John Hafernik, a professor at San Francisco State University and member of the ZomBee Watch team. “We’ve known that it has affected bumblebees and probably yellow jacket wasps as well … and it’s now affecting honeybees.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iin3_-WiOHY&w=640&h=390]

Hafernik said phorid flies are native to Canada, and have been around for thousands of years, unlike honeybees, which were introduced by European settlers.

“We’re trying to find out how big of a threat is this to the honeybee,” he said. “We know that if a honeybee is infected by the fly, it’s very likely to die.”

As a researcher of the phorid fly, Brian Brown, the head of the Natural History Museum’s entomology department in Los Angeles County, said phorids attack by laying eggs inside bees, causing larvae to grow by feeding on a bee’s body tissue. After the larvae pupates, it turns into an adult fly.

When a bee is infected with the parasite, Brown said, its behaviour becomes odd, and zombie-like.

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“Worker bees kind of get stranded and disoriented,” he said. “We also find them sort of buzzing around on the ground, and not able to fly because the fly larva has eaten so much of the bee’s tissues.”

While the discovery is concerning, Hafernik said it’s not uncommon for honeybees to be infected in the San Francisco Bay area. He said a high percentage of bees in a colony can have the parasite, but doesn’t know if that’s typical in Canada yet.

“If a large enough number of honeybees get infected, that could cause a hive to either fail or become less productive,” he said. “At this point we believe that primarily honeybee workers are being infected as they go out forging for pollen and nectar.”

Wallbank hopes that by tracking her infected bees, she can help ZomBee Watch collect data about the honeybee population and prevent the parasites from spreading.

“Any bees that have been parasitized, I dispose of them,” she said. “So at least I’m taking those larvae out of the system.”

VANCOUVER — A whale watching association says a battle between some of the largest creatures in the seas off the coast of British Columbia appeared to end with the human equivalent of fist waving and name calling, although they can’t be sure of the outcome.

Several whale watching boats at the western edge of the Salish Sea off Jordan River on Vancouver Island spotted a group of transient orcas surrounding two adult humpback whales and a calf on Sunday.

Naturalist Valerie Shore also saw the standoff from another boat and says most of the action happened below the surface but there was huffing, puffing and occasional swipes of their tails from the humpbacks as they blocked access to the calf.

She says the adult humpbacks finally chased off the orcas, but she and her crew suspect the calf may have suffered a torn tail, although they couldn’t get close enough to confirm it.

“We saw what we thought at the time was a large blood burst and seconds later a humpback, possibly the calf, rose and remained stationary at the surface. We all gasped, thinking it was a massive wound,” Shore says in the release from the association.

Malleson radioed later to say the burst was whale feces, which Shore speculates may have been a defence mechanism or the response of a very frightened young humpback.

“I’m not sure if the killer whales ever thought they were going to be able to take one of these humpbacks out,” says Malleson, “but it appears they certainly enjoyed getting them worked up.”

The Yorkshire Terrier named Jack was no ordinary pooch. He was old — so old, in fact, he was thought to be the oldest of all the dogs in Great Britain.

When Jack turned 26 in December 2015, or maybe he turned 24 or 25, the dog had lived a decade beyond the average Yorkshire terrier. He became something of a British animal celebrity. If you convert dog years to human years, as the U.K. media did when celebrating the dog’s jubilee, Jack was the equivalent of 117 people years old.

Jack did not live to such a ripe age without acquiring some quirks. He was fussy, preferring a diet of sirloin steak or corned beef to kibble. He had arthritis and was occasionally incontinent, once urinating on his owner after the dog curled up to sleep on the bed. That was small price to pay, perhaps, for 16 years with what his owners, Ray and Mary Bunn, called a smart and funny animal.

“He was brilliant, very intelligent. If he wanted his tea he would tell you, if he wanted taking out he would tell you,” Ray Bunn told the Daily Record, “He was a marvellous dog. He was a character, everybody loved him.”

More than a decade ago, Bunn’s daughter’s next-door neighbour spotted two people tying Jack to a tree and then leaving the dog to his fate. The neighbour decided to rescue the abandoned pooch, but was unable to keep it. So the Bunn family stepped in.

“My daughter told me about it and asked me to go round and the first time I saw him, he came running over to me and jumped into my arms,” Bunn recently told the Mirror. “I didn’t even hold my arms out — the bond was instant. He very quickly became a big part of the family, and now we’ve had him for 16 years.”

(The unorthodox adoption clouds Jack’s exact age. At the time he was freed from the tree, Jack was believed to be 10 years old, making him 26 in December. If Jack was indeed so old he was nearing record-breaking longevity: The oldest dog to ever live, as confirmed by the Guinness World Records, lived to 29.)

Abandonment, according to Bunn, was not the worst thing that could have happened to Jack. “He had a brother,” he said, “and we heard that he had been fed to a Rottweiler, so he was facing a horrible future before my daughter’s friend took him.”

Despite Jack’s unusual history and the encroaching ailments of a very long life — epileptic seizures, back problems — his owners hoped he would pass in his sleep, an ordinary way to go, drifting off after dreams of rabbit chases and favourite smells.

“We’ve had him for so long now and we’re dreading the day when he goes,” Bunn said in a December interview with the Telegraph. “He is like a son to me.”

It was not to be. Jack’s life ended in a splash of blood and teeth.

On Monday, Ray Bunn and Jack’s morning routine began as it normally did. Around 9 a.m., Bunn had driven to the marina in Hartlepool, a town on England’s eastern seaboard, with a friend. As Bunn started to slip on Jack’s leash, another dog ran up to the car. The black Lakeland terrier bore down on Jack like a squall upon a sailboat.

The attack was swift and took Bunn by surprise. The strange dog tore into Jack’s side. “It started to sink its teeth into the dog and I began punching it in the face but it wouldn’t let go,” Bunn said to the Independent. The tussle lasted for three minutes, Bunn told the Times of London, until his blows forced the Lakeland terrier away. Jack was left in a pool of his own blood.

Jack knew he was loved and cared for. He had a very long and happy life, and I take comfort from that

Bunn swaddled Jack, bleeding heavily though still alive, in a blanket. “We wrapped him up and put him in the back of the car,” he told the Northern Echo. On the way to the veterinarian, Jack succumbed to his wounds. Bunn located the Lakeland terrier’s owner and reported the incident to the police, according to the Echo.

Local authorities are investigating the incident though have not yet determined if a crime had occurred. “Police received a report from a male that his dog had been attacked yesterday morning in Hartlepool and sadly it passed away,” a representative for the Cleveland police department told the Gazette Live. “Cleveland Police will make inquiries into whether any offences have taken place.”

The Bunns were devastated after losing Jack.

“Jack had me up at 5:45 a.m. and I shouted at him. I feel guilty about that now, but Jack knew he was loved and cared for,” Mary Bunn said in an interview with the Times. “He had a very long and happy life, and I take comfort from that.”

Jack left an irreplaceable gap, the Bunns said, that will not be filled by a new pet.

At first, Ron Lancour thought the creature in the lake was a waterfowl.

Lancour was fishing nearly a kilometre from shore on Sheridan Lake in inland British Columbia. The lake was mostly quiet midday last Friday, but something was swimming toward the front of his boat.

During the coming minutes, Lancour learned his visitor was not a bird. Nor was it calm. It was a badger, snarling at the snout, heading straight for Lancour and his fishing lines.

Gavin Young/Postmedia/FileA B.C. badger expert told Ron Lancour that badgers are “very docile and not aggressive.” Not always, it seems.

“He was coming in my boat whether I liked it or not, and he was telling me to get out,” Lancour, 70, said Wednesday.

Lancour is an avid outdoorsman. In his heyday, he trapped bears for the city of Kelowna, B.C., where he lives. These days, he prefers to fish, often at Sheridan Lake, where the rainbow trout are plentiful.

He did not expect to confront a badger. An hour into the fishing trip, he was half-asleep, expending just enough energy to check on the lines dangling out the back of the boat. Suddenly, he was under siege.

“I just glanced to the front of my boat, and that’s when I seen this critter swimming in the water,” Lancour said. “It kind of disappeared from sight. I couldn’t see it as it went around the side of the boat.

“I went to the side to look over, and then I heard him come snarling over the transom, between the motors. Right away, as soon as I saw his face, I knew what it was … I know badgers, and I didn’t want him in the boat with me.”

Lancour had a few advantages. He said he is quick-witted when it comes to dealing with animals, having encountered nuisance wildlife throughout his years as a trapper.

While the badger was big — about 10 kilograms based on Lancour’s frantic estimate — it could not, of course, wield tools.

Supplied by Ron LancourA photo Ron Lancour says shows the badger swimming away from his boat last Friday, after he foiled the animal's attempted attack.

“I reached and grabbed my net, which has a long handle, and I turned around and tried shoving him with the handle into the water,” Lancour said. But the animal started chewing the handle.

Poking at the badger would not suffice, so Lancour knew he had to stun it. Only a forceful smack on the nose would send it tumbling off the boat.

But even as he defended himself, Lancour managed to keep a broader concern in mind: there are only 200 or so badgers left in B.C. They are classified as endangered and inadvertently killing one, even as it tried to maul him, would be a shame.

“I didn’t want to just really bat him one,” Lancour said. “I was pushing on him with a paddle, and I just about got him in the water, and he came back again. He was gaining on me. I just gave him a little harder rap on the nose and I broke my paddle. But I was able to push him in the water.”

The ordeal was done — and then, just as quickly, it wasn’t. The badger swam around the back of the boat. It clambered aboard again. Lancour, holding the shaft of his splintered oar, said he finally knocked the animal away. He steered off, at speed. The badger, defeated, swam to land.

Supplied by Ron LancourRon Lancour broke his paddle when he tried to stun the badger by hitting it on the nose.

“It seemed like it lasted forever, but it was probably only a minute or two,” he said.

“I’ve dealt with nuisance wildlife all my life. It wasn’t new to me. But this kind of incident was kind of new. Never heard of it happening before.”

In the days since the faceoff, Lancour has spoken with a B.C. badger expert, who told him badgers often traverse lakes in search of new territory. “He also said they’re very docile and not aggressive,” Lancour said. “I guess they have to rewrite the book of badger now.”

He has thought about his boat, a five-metre Starcraft that wasn’t damaged in the incursion. The boat does not have a name as of now but people have suggested he call it The Badger.

As for Lancour, he didn’t have any second thoughts about getting back on the water. After steering away from the animal for good on Friday, he peered over the expanse of Sheridan Lake, suddenly calm once again. He fished for another 90 minutes.

Clarence Sveinson doesn’t talk much. Not when there is work to be done. But mention fishflies to the commercial fisherman, and the hullabaloo the winged insects have been generating around Gimli, Man., of late, by dying off in great multitudes and littering the town and its pretty beach with their stinking, rotting, fishfly corpses, and Sveinson starts talking, since what stinks to some smells like money to him.

“Anytime there are lots of fishflies, it means the lake is healthy and full of fish,” he says, from his family’s freshwater fish store on Ninth Avenue. “If there were no fishflies, then I’d be worried.

“Right now, we got nothing to complain about.”

Perhaps that is because Sveinson’s store isn’t right next to Gimli beach. Alyssa Leochko is 17, and works for the local beach patrol, changing garbages, cleaning public washrooms and generally keeping things neat and tidy along the town’s (population 2,000) stretch of sand.

“The fishflies are always bad here, but this year they are incredibly bad,” she says. “It is really smelly. There is an awful stench — you should wear a mask if you’re cleaning them up — that’s how bad the smell is.”

On Monday, Gimli’s patrollers collected 42 garbage bags worth of decomposing fishflies — which smell a lot like decomposing fish — from the beach and boardwalk. Dead critters crunched underfoot. In places, they were ankle-deep. Meanwhile, in town, storefronts and houses are being painted over with the bugs. They appear every July, but this July have been blown into town by the millions, thanks to an atypical easterly breeze.

Gimli’s plight, while, ahem, unpleasant to sniff at, has been a great source of pleasure for Terry Galloway, an entomologist at the University of Manitoba. Galloway was examining seagull lice under a microscope when I phoned to speak with him Thursday. His first comment was to correct a widely held misconception: Gimli’s fishflies aren’t really fishflies, he said, but “burrowing mayflies.”

“Mayflies are the more entomologically correct name,” the professor says. “Fishflies are a common local name. Where I grew up on Lake Erie, we called them June bugs, or June flies.

“But these burrowing mayflies are amazing, amazing insects.”

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How amazing? For starters, as eggs, they lie dormant on the bottom of Lake Winnipeg for about a year before hatching. After they hatch they breath through their gills, in their little lake-bottom burrows, gorging on whatever organic material drifts by. They then emerge from the burrows in July as nymphs, rising to the lake’s surface — where fish get fat and healthy from eating gobs of them — shedding their skins and flying away as “sub-adults” before shedding their skin, again, to become full blown adults, with just 24 hours to live.

“They make hay while the sun shines,” Galloway says. “They shed their skin, mate, the females crash on the water, lay their eggs — and that’s it — they are done.”

Well, not quite done. Their corpses drift back into shore, to decompose on Gimli’s beach. Clarence Sveinson cheerfully refers to this process as “Mother Nature” doing her thing. Alyssa Leochko describes the cycle of fishfly life in more evocative terms.